I posted this in my journal once...
Anyway, so here's the nutshell of a story.
Quadrette (real name Jessica, which will make sense later) and I got engaged on August 8, 2003.
My cousin K, who lives up in the Adirondacks, invited Quadrette and I up to the Glens Falls area for her birthday, on that Friday, the 8th. She suggested that we join her and her boyfriend M (now her husband as of last weekend!) for a birthday hike up Sleeping Beauty mountain, in the heart of the Adirondacks.
So we drove up to my family's Adirondack place on a Thursday night and left Friday morning to meet them at the mountain. However, when we stopped to get gas on the way, K had left us a voicemail - M had some bad food the night before and had been up all night, sick as a dog, so they wouldn't be able to meet us for the hike. We were already close to the hike site so I suggested to Quadrette that we just go ahead and do the hike anyway.
So we did the hike, which took about an hour, and brought us to the most beautiful view of the Adirondack mountains:
As we stood up there admiring the view, I told Quadrette that this was such a great hike that we should take some kind of momento home with us.
"What, like a rock?"
"Yeah, how about that one over there?"
So she went to check it out, and when she turned it over:
At which point, she turned around, I said some stuff and asked her to marry me.
(she said yes, the fool.)
Upon accepting, we took another few minutes to just take it all in, and then I led her down a steep trail of rocks, which curved around and led us to K and M, who had arrived at the mountaintop early (surprise!) to set up the rock and had a beautiful tablecloth laid out with champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries for a toast.
And that was that. A fun time was had by all. Here's the ring:
There's more to this story – my original plan, why it didn't work, blah blah blah – but it's not interesting enough to talk about.
My real accomplishment was that I didn't tell anybody other than my officemate, my cousin, Quadrette's brother and a close friend who didn't know any of my other friends. It was a lot of fun to keep everybody wondering why the hell we had dated six and a half years and I hadn't proposed. Plus, Quadrette is so good at figuring me out. I have barely ever been able to really, really surprise her. I wanted to see if I could keep a really big secret pretty much to myself, and I knew that the more people I told, the more chances I had of letting it slip at some point or another. She was pretty surprised, so mission accomplished.
uber1, if you wanna use the rock idea, PM me, I can get you in touch with the people I used. BTW, that's not writing on the rock in pen or anything, it's actually inscribed in the rock. Makes for a lovely engagement tool....PLUS it makes a wonderful paperweight or door stop!
105 days until the wedding....